Martin Ayres

Martin Ayres has worked at Jaguar for over twelve years, and once again joins Team Sky as their performance engineer during the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France and Vuelta á Éspaña in 2013. Having not ridden a bike for over 20 years, Martin is a recent convert to the sport after his experiences with the Team in 2012 – including during their historic winning campaign for the Tour de France.

“It’s a lap of France”, mentioned Chris Froome recently. Examining that statement a little more explains a lot about the Tour de France. No other event can quite compete in terms of scale; I think it is fair to say.

Here in Treviso (a hub of Italian cycling) it looks like a big pink paint bomb has gone off. As with the Tour in yellow, the Giro is all about pink – the strapline for the race is ‘the fight for pink’.

The weather over the past few days has been far from ideal. The riders turned up yesterday at the team bus looking like they’d just undergone a severe hosing down. I’m usually amazed by how well they look and cheerful they are after such long distances, but they really wore the day on their expressions yesterday.

Giro d’Italia? What’s that? I hear you say. Well, for anyone who has thumbed past page one in the cycling-for-dummies handbook (no, that does not exist) it is the second most famous race in the world, only beaten by a certain Tour de France.